I have a new short story available to read.

'Grasshopper' was written in response to events in real time with me finishing it only a couple of weeks ago. It takes the form of a woman in a remote village writing a journal which documents the moments when coronavirus creeps first through the country, then into her community and finally into her family.

Writing in this way - quickly, with ever-changing events informing the direction of the story - isn't usually my style but, like many other writers I know, I have found trying to think creatively with all of this swirling around me pretty much impossible. So it was cathartic to try to give voice to the anxieties I feel must have been fairly common over the past few months. Ordinarily, I would sit on a finished story like this for a while before putting it through the editorial process, trying to restructure the piece and smooth away the flaws. Clearly, in this instance the piece would lose some of its intended impact. My hope is that it feels authentic.

This piece was commissioned by Greater Manchester Combined Authority for their Covid-19 archive of works documenting and responding to the times we've all found ourselves living through.

You can read 'Grasshopper' here.

I have two very different events coming up which, quite simply, you'd be a blithering fool to miss.

First: I'll be for the launch of Love Bites, the latest anthology of short fiction from Dostoevsky Wannabe which takes Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks as its instigating force, where I'll be reading from my story 'Sky Yen', on Saturday 5th October at Gulliver's in, appropriately enough, Manchester. Tickets are free and you can find them along with all the other info you need here. 

Then: we smash-cut to Tuesday October 29th when I'll be at Blackwells Manchester to compere an event with Lee Rourke, a man whose writing I've long admired (he too has contributed to Love Bites) but who I've never before met, and Jenn Ashworth, a colleague, co-writer and childhood friend. Lee's latest book is Glitch, a transatlantic novel of family and grief. Jenn's is Notes Made While Falling, a mind-bending literary memoir of motherhood and madness. I'll be in conversation with both, touching on grief, belief, the body, the north and turning experience into writing. Once again, tickets are free and can be found alongside all the ancillary information here. 

I've been quite quiet lately, due in large part to an unusually large number of projects I currently find myself working on. BUT I do have a new short story out. It’s called ‘Sky Yen’ and can be found in Love Bites: Fiction Inspired by Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks, an anthology from Manchester’s own DIY publisher Dostoevsky Wannabe. As its title hopefully makes clear, this is a collection of stories which take their inspiration from the late songwriter Pete Shelley and his erstwhile band Buzzcocks.

Shelley was perhaps the premier architect of the pop-punk song, largely down to the Buzzocks’ hits as well as his early solo recordings. But he has always struck me as a more enigmatic figure than his reputation would imply. His pop songs are powered by traditional teenage boy-girl lyrics but he was also openly bisexual; Buzzocks were very much emblematic of the deeply British anarchic music scene he was so instrumental in establishing in the late 70s but he later fled the country to settle down with his family in Estonia; his standing was built on his catchy melodic music but he also created perhaps the most austerely experimental recording I own, Sky Yen.

Sky Yen is composed of two tracks, ‘Sky Yen 1’ and ‘Sky Yen 2’. It was recorded in the early 1970s, before Buzzcocks even existed, and was made using an oscillator Shelley has created himself by soldering together components which came free with electronics magazines. The resulting recording is something which in the words of one fan, 'has more in common with air raid sirens than music'. This is true. Sky Yen is the sound of a young man discovering he has the tools with which to experiment with sound, with harmonics and dissonance, compelling or unlistenable, depending on the mood you find yourself in when you listen to it.

So, you may reasonably wonder, how does someone set about trying to transmute music like this into narrative fiction?

I thought primarily about Shelley himself, a complex character who struggled with the career path music traditionally offers. The collection was instigated by his the sudden death and while I was writing I thought as much about the subsequent assessment of the impact Shelley had had on our culture as I did about the music of Sky Yen. Debates such as these, taking place as they do in our Brexit Hell era where, for me at least, remembrances of the past feel untrustworthy and nostalgia tainted with a noxious power, also fed into the story. Similarly, ‘Sky Yen’ concerns itself with the concertina-like nature of time, the past impacting on the present in the most violent ways only for it to retreat again, distant and untouchable. If all that sound rather gloomily po-faced rest assured that it also touches briefly on the cheerier themes of the Holocaust and PTSD.

The collection, which, like all Dostoevsky Wannabe books, looks great, also features work by Wendy Erskine, Lee Rourke and Luke Kennard, among many others, and can be purchased here.

I have a new story, titled 'The School Project', in the latest issue of The Shadow Booth, the UK's premier book-shaped journal for the sort of weird, creepy fiction I love to both read and write.
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Although, yeah - okay - technically, it's not really a new story. It is in fact an old story, one which I've slightly neatened up for publication. In its original iteration it was titled 'School Report' and was joint-winner of the 2011 Manchester Fiction Prize. I've made a few minor cuts, smoothed out a few sections and sorted out my simply unforgivable inconsistencies with em- and en-dashes.

Back in 2011 when I first wrote this thing I was newly unemployed, having been made redundant from my job as a bookseller, and found I unexpectedly had the time to write in between desperately looking for another job, so decided to work on an idea I'd had for a short story and submit it to a competition, which turned out to be a good idea. If you've not read it before - any why should you have? - it is written from the collective first-person perspective of a group of children at a rural school and is takes poverty and collective delusion as its loose themes. I later spent a not inconsiderable amount of my time trying to turn it into a novel, which turned out to be a less good idea.

Although at the time my mind was full of Anders Breivik and the then fairly new culture of austerity, eight years down the line the mindset which vaguely linked those two things feels if anything more concrete and more prevalent: tribal groupthink and ideological violence seem set to be the hallmarks of 2019.

Perhaps now is the time for me to attempt a convincing suggestion that, despite all this, it's not quite as horrendously grim a story I've no doubt indicated. There is, for instance, also sneezing and beanbags and (something which somehow eluded me until I re-read and re-edited it) more of than a dose of Wicker Man to the proceedings. 

And, in any case, despite the inclusion of my story, there are wonderful contributions from the likes of Robert Shearman and Verity Holloway, among others, which I highly recommend.

You can order a copy of The Shadow Booth here. 

I’ve contributed a brief piece on Tolstoy’s classic winter tale ‘Master and Man’ to this year’s festive edition of A Personal Anthology, the site where writers curate their favourite works of short fiction into a dream anthology, all of which is overseen by the great Jonathan Gibbs.

You can read the whole thing here.